Since it’s a cliché to start out with “It was a dark and stormy night,” I guess I’ll cut the dramatics. It was actually about four in the afternoon, and though the sky was kind of overcast, it wasn’t exactly what I’d call a storm, even by my I’m-a-lame-California-boy-and-we-don’t-have-real-weather-here standards.

So basically…

It was a vaguely overcast afternoon.

That totally doesn’t have the same effect.

But I’m not getting anywhere—I believe I was telling a story. I was walking home from school, which I guess I didn’t normally do, because I usually took my bike. But that’s how all scary stories start, right? Something out of the ordinary happens.

“Crap,” I muttered to myself, staring at the empty chainlink fence. Why, you may ask? Because it wasn’t empty when I locked my bike to it this morning. Great.

Cursing under my breath, I began my long trek home. Okay, so it’s not that long. But still. I had a tendency to complain.

Around this time of year, you kind of get to thinking about zombies and stuff. Well, I kind of had a thing about zombies, actually. So I guess I was sort of thinking about zombies pretty much every time of year. Zombies seem pretty cool in theory, right—I mean, dead people reanimated to chase after you and eat your brain. That’s a pretty sick concept. Or at least, to a sixteen-year-old boy it is. So you can’t blame me for having this thing about zombies—they were cool. They were dead, but they could walk, only really slowly, but they had like, epic stamina and would eventually catch you and eat your brain. So anyway, there I was, walking home and thinking about zombies, when the sky went kinda dark.

It kinda weirded me out for a second, because I was like, “WTF, it was just so recently a vaguely overcast afternoon! Why is the sky going kinda dark?”

And that’s when I realized I was passing the church. You know. The church that had the cemetery. With the dead bodies.

And you know what they say about the sky going dark when you’re adjacent to a multitude of dead bodies.

“IT’S THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!” I found myself shrieking to the sky. I’m sure that if there had been anyone in the vicinity, they might’ve turned to give me an odd look. But no one was there, so no one did.

That’s when the moaning started.

And I don’t mean that in a sexual way.

Like, “Arrrrrggghhhhhhaaahhuuguuughghghghhhhhhhhh!” kind of moaning. Dead-guy-arising moaning. Creepy, eerie, utterly spine-chilling moaning.

Zombie moaning.

I quickened my pace, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t be caught in what could either be the coolest even of my life… or the last event of my life.

Well, I apologize—I said I was going to cut the dramatics.

Er. I lied.

So there I was, walking super-duper-fast, with scary zombie moaning following me. “Don’t look back, Nate,” I murmured to myself. “Don’t look back don’t look back don’t look back.”

But you know, when you repeat something enough times, it kind of loses its meaning, and then you forget what your mantra was in the first place and you look back and there’s an army of the dead tailing you.

THERE WAS AN ARMY OF THE DEAD TAILING ME.

A noise ripped from my vocal cords in the vague manner of a young female.

That is to say, I screamed like a freakin’ girl.

I started running. Which was stupid, obviously, because if you run, you’ll eventually get tired, and then the zombies will catch you because zombies never tire. So I stopped running and tried to catch my breath—I was not exactly an athlete—and when I looked back, the zombies were still following me with that creepy snail’s pace. They were nearly a block behind me, but it was really getting dark by now because apparently when an army of dead Catholics from the church graveyard arises, the sky goes dark. I don’t think the zombies like the sun too much. Or maybe the sun just doesn’t like zombies.

So I tried to recall everything I’d ever learned about zombies. I think their natural enemy is the ninja, they turn to dust in sunlight, and the only way to kill one in the dark is to light them on fire and drown them. Which seems kind of counter-intuitive, right? Lighting something on fire and then tossing it in the water when you are indeed trying to destroy it. But I thought that was the rule.

Now, I didn’t smoke. Still don’t, if I can help it. Which I can. SAY NO TO DRUGS. But due to this fact, I didn’t have a lighter or anything on me, so I had no idea how I was supposed to set a hoard of zombies on fire. Also I felt bad about burning them up, because obviously they were somebody’s grandparents, you know, to be buried in the church graveyard. But whatever. If my grandma turned into a psychotic brain-eating zombie, I’d burn her too.

That makes me sound so violent. You’d probably have me sent to therapy if I wasn’t already going.

Anyway. I had no way of lighting these zombies on fire, which was an issue if I wanted to get rid of them. I could always hope the sun would pop out, but it was getting to look kind of like eternal night out here, so I didn’t figure that as an option.

I kept walking, though, because that’s pretty much what you gotta do when tireless evil beings of the walking dead variety are tailing you for some inexplicable reason. I led them away from my house, because really, why would you walk toward your house when you’ve got a load of zombies on your ass? That, my friends, would be nonsensical.

It was getting on about six o’clock by the time my legs started aching. So I sat in the middle of the sidewalk and weighed my options—A) I could stay here and wait for the zombies to catch up with me and eat my brain, or B) I could keep walking and wait until I fainted from exhaustion so that the zombies could catch up with me and eat my brains. Either way, my prospects were not looking too good.

Apparently, my subconscious chose for me, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up to evil-zombie-type moaning. And now you’re like, wait, what? You fell asleep? Nate, you freakin’ dumbass. What is your problem? How could you fall asleep when a mass of zombies was on your tail?

Two words, my friends, two words—AP Euro homework.

So yes, due to my lack of sleep for the past two months, along with the fact that I’d covered about ten miles just now, I fell asleep when a mass of zombies was on my tail.

And now they’d caught up to me. I was dead for sure. My doom was imminent. I could see my life flashing before my eyes—oh wait, that was actually fire flashing before my eyes. Um. Wait. Pause. Rewind. Slow motion. Some dude with a lighter just jumped in front of me to shield me from the zombies.

Aww. My hero.

“Stand back,” he commanded me, like he was some big bad zombie hunter and I was the damsel in distress. Even though, duh, not a damsel, but whatever. I did as he said, because he had the lighter. You always listen to the guy with the lighter when zombies are involved. It’s the new world order.

I stood back and watched as the guy lit a zombie on fire and pushed him into the zombie next to him. This started a chain reaction of flaming zombies falling on top of each other, which, in retrospect, was actually pretty cool.

When the entire group of zombies was aflame, the pretty blonde boy walked over to me and held out his hand for me to shake. “Hi, I’m Dash.”

“Nate,” I said. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for saving me from the zombies.”

He laughed. He had a nice laugh. “I don’t hear that every day. But no problem.”

“We have to drown them,” I pointed out.

Dash sighed. “I knew you were going to say that. Ugh. Okay. How exactly are we going to drown seventy-five flaming zombies?”

I laughed. “We could always pray for rain!” I joked.

And with a clap of thunder, rain cinematically began to fall. I smiled. For the first time today, something had gone right. We waited, watching, as the zombies slowly melted into a foul-smelling blackish goop. Which was gross, obviously, but I’d take foul-smelling blackish goop over brain-eating zombies any day.

When they were all completely gone, the clouds actually parted, and I could see that it was just barely sunset. I looked over at Dash. “I’ve got a long way home,” I hinted.

He grinned at me mischievously. “How ‘bout you let me give you a ride?”

I grinned back. “Sounds like a plan.”

When we finally arrived at my house, and I made to get out of the car, Dash grabbed my wrist. “Wait.”

“What?” I looked back at him. He bit his lip.

“Um… since I saved you from the zombie apocalypse and all… you wanna hang out some time?”

I smiled. “I stole your phone and put my number in while you were driving. For a badass zombie slayer, you’re really unobservant. So how about we do something… normal-er next time. A movie, maybe? One condition, though—no zombies.”

Dash smiled at me. “Sounds like a plan.”

And they all lived happily ever after. Except for the zombies who were still a large puddle of foul-smelling blackish goop in the middle of the conveniently empty road.

The End.