Ok so this image was created for me using my own face and zombifying it. The following story was also custom written for me personally, by a talented guy who writes stories for people for 5 bucks.
As the world fell into chaos, and the human race found itself down a notch on the food chain, there was another world that seemed to grow with each passing day as the citizens barricaded themselves away from the infected. It was a new world where you could be anything and do anything your mind could fathom. You didn’t even have to be human anymore. Michelle used to be a young woman from Calgary Canada. She had all the trappings of a normal person, with a job, a boyfriend, a family, a life. Now she was transformed. In this new world, Michelle was a level 85 Gnome Warrior that went by the name of Punky Bruiser. In this place, the dead could be dispatched by the simple casting of a fire spell or with a well-timed swing of the sword. Perhaps this is why Michelle, and millions like her, escaped the horrifying reality just outside their doors in exchange for something better. A new life, a new reality, and a new world. A World of Warcraft.
It seemed to take no more than a week before the T.V. stations went silent. There were still a few Emergency Broadcast radio stations active, but those were disappearing too. There seemed to be only one place left for information, and that was the internet. Many of the servers that were the backbone of the web had gone dark. Every day, more and more sites were gone, and with that, less and less information about the new plague that had turned everyday men and women into ravenous beasts tearing through the streets of Calgary, devouring everyone in sight. There were only a small percentage of the world’s servers still functioning, and incredibly, the World of Warcraft servers appeared to be untouched.
As the other sites disappeared, millions of people took to the World of Warcraft, and gathered in droves in all the major cities in all of the videogame continents. Some were there to spread news, others to hear it. Some tried to find surviving loved ones, screaming out their names as they sprinted down the pixelated streets. Then there were others, like Michelle. She no longer concerned herself with the latest news. It was all downhill at this point, and she knew it. Instead, she would choose to soar high above it all. She watched the peculiar and treacherous expanses of Azeroth zip past her computer screen as she rode on the wings of her epic flying mount. Up here, no one could hurt her. Here, she was a Warrior’s Warrior. A slayer of man and beasts who’s bloodlust knew no quenching. Here, there were no ravenous corpses just beyond the sliding bolt. Here, she was free.
She was just landing in the pirate city of Booty Bay, when she heard the thing out in the hallway as it began to howl and scream for her blood. She tried to drown out the sounds of those rotting fists slamming against her door, but the monster would just scream louder and louder. Thankfully her boyfriend had bought her a pair of noise cancelling headphones for her last birthday. These did a fine job of, if not blocking, at least greatly calming the terrible sounds from the apartment hallway. She was trapped here, but she just didn’t care. She had better things to do than worry about the things she couldn’t do anything about. She had dungeons to ransack, dragons to exterminate, and more treasure to collect than could even fit in her bank vault back in Stormwind.
Days went by, but Michelle never left her computer unless it was for food, sleep, or a quick trip to the toilet. She’d given up on waiting for the rescue that she knew would never come. As further days passed, Michelle began to hear more of the creatures outside her door. They must have known she was there somehow. Worse yet, that night, she laid awake in terror at the horrible scratching noises coming from inside her walls. The louder they seemed to get, the louder she’d turn up her headphones.
The scratching stopped during the daytime, but the pounding fists and brutal growls of the undead never ceased.
One morning, she was awoken to the sounds of a man outside the apartment building, begging for help and screaming in distress. Michelle walked to the window just in time to see this large man, covered in fur balls that seemed to pulse and move. She stared at the man flailing his limbs as he squealed in sheer, torturous agony. It took a moment for her to recognize these small patches of fur covering the man’s body. They were rats. That man was being swarmed and devoured by an army of rats. Michelle doubled over in pain and began vomiting violently.
Michelle had hated rats since she was a small child. At 6 years old, Michelle had been left in the sandbox for only a minute while her Mother used the bathroom. When her Mother returned, she found her little girl screaming in terror. She was bleeding from her hand, and when little Michelle pointed to the corner of the sandbox, her Mother saw the massive rat that had attacked her young child. Her mother beat the rat to death with the heel of her boot and then threw the smashed corpse into the trashcan out behind the house.
She could almost feel that stinging pain in her hand again, even all these years later as she stared at the throbbing, fur covered mound now lying out on the pavement. She was about to go lay down when the rats all began streaming away from the body of the man. What she saw then sent violent shivers to her very core. He was nothing more than a bit of muscle, flesh, and sinew attached to bones. Somehow, the rats had devoured him like little furry piranha.
She tried to move away from the window, but her feet seemed glued to the spot. She watched to the bitter end as the last of the rats scuttled away from the blood red skeleton until it just laid there unmoving. She watched in further horror as the gore streaked collection of bones began moving on its own. It could only seem to raise its head slightly, and move its legs just inches in limited directions. How could that even be possible?
Plague rats. They would feast on the corpses of the dead, and then bite the living, thus transferring whatever disease that killed their previous meal to their current snack. But these rats moved too quickly. They darted around like mad. It was then that Michelle realized what she was looking at. The rats weren’t just plague carriers this time. The rats were missing pieces of fur, flesh, and muscle in certain spots. The rats were just like the walking corpses in the streets. They had come back, and now they were hungrier than ever.
Michelle went to her cabinet and found an unopened bottle of whiskey. She pushed around a few glasses trying to find her shot glass, but finally gave up and just took the whole bottle with her to her computer. She sat in front of the screen and smiled at her alter ego who didn’t seem nearly as negatively affected by the end of humanity as Michelle was. She tipped the bottle back and took an enormous swig of the burning sweet liquid. She coughed hard as she moved the mouse pointer over Punky Bruisers title on the character selection screen. She clicked the mouse as she’d done a thousand times before, but this time, a small window popped up on the screen announcing that the server was not currently available.
She sat there, staring down her monitor as the tears began to well up until they tumbled over the edges of her lower eyelids. This was her only way out, and now they’d taken this away from her as well. Michelle was racked with sobs as the tears continued to flow down the sides of her face.
She sat there crying in front of her PC for what felt like hours at the loss of her only and last companion. Losing Punky hurt her more than it did her Boyfriend, her parents, or even her roommate. Punky was Michelle’s last place she could hide from the reality of what was going on around her. Michelle flipped off the power switch on her tower, and again reached for the bottle of whiskey.
She was about to tip back the bottle when she heard that horrible scratching again. She tried to drown the noise out of her mind by taking another massive gulp of the brown liquor, and then stumbled over to her bed. She collapsed onto the mattress face down, and cried silently into her pillow.
She laid there shaking gently, knowing exactly what horrible things were that were clawing out the insides of her walls. She could hear them getting closer. They knew she was there. They could smell her blood just waiting to be lapped up from her shredded veins and arteries. They would have her, and she knew there was no escaping, so she tipped the bottle up to the ceiling and swallowed as much of the bittersweet liquid as she could before gagging and coughing up a mouthful of the liquor back onto the bed spread.
The scratching now seemed to be resonating from every wall in the apartment. It was coming from behind the light fixtures and even through floor and ceiling. She was surrounded by hundreds of infected childhood nightmares that sounded just inches of plaster away from sinking their teeth into her soft pink flesh.
With no viable options left, Michelle realized that if she could down the entire bottle of whiskey before the rats bored through the walls, she might not even feel it when the end came. She sat up, took a deep breath, tipped the bottle towards the ceiling, and poured the liquor down her waiting throat. She managed a few swallows of it before coughing a bit more up on the bed. She took another steadying breath, and right as she was about to take another belt off of the bottle, she heard the plaster crack and crumble from across the room. This was followed immediately by the sounds of dozens of tiny clawed feet scratching against the hardwood floor.
Michelle pulled the comforter up over her head and laid down on her side, still clutching the half drank bottle to her chest. She took another sip as she felt them moving over the comforter and crawling all over her body. As she felt their surprising weight, she shook with an anxiety she’d never known before. She went for one more sip when she felt the fur of one of the infected rats brush against her foot. She screamed as she felt its razor sharp incisors biting and tearing into the soft fleshy padding of her foot.
The whiskey didn’t work. The pain was excruciating, and in a heartbeat, she threw the blanket off of her, sending dozens of decaying little creatures flying through the air. Her feet hit the ground running, but they were already leaping up onto her, piercing her flesh with their teeth and claws. She tried to shake them off, but for every one she managed to send tumbling away, three more took its place. She left the bedroom and headed towards the hall, but with every step, she felt slower and heavier. She stumbled down her hall and past her bathroom, when what she caught in the bathroom mirror stopped her in her tracks. Her body was covered in dozens of these things, and she was soaked in her own blood that seemed to gush forth from numerous flaps of now hanging skin.
Michelle both could not, and would not believe what she had just seen. She turned quickly from the mirror and headed further down the hall towards the front door. In her extreme suffering, she suddenly had the idea that if she could just make it outside the apartment, the rats would all let go, and she could run to freedom. She moved as quickly as she could towards the door, but with every step, her body seemed to weigh pounds more. She took another step, and as she tried to take a deep breath, one of the little beasts pushed its way into her mouth, and began gnawing the hell out her tongue.
Michelle didn’t think twice about it, she just bit down as hard as she could, and then spit out the head of the infected rodent and little bits of her tongue that rolled about in her mouth when her teeth ground to a close. A few more steps and she’d be out the door. She reached for the doorknob, but suddenly couldn’t hold herself upright, and tumbled forward to the floor.
The rats were pouring in now from numerous holes in every wall in the apartment. She could feel their combined weight pressing her to the floor, but still, she could almost reach the doorknob. As her arm hung in the air, stretched towards the brass knob that separated her from life and death, dozens of infected vermin latched onto that arm, tearing away flesh at an incredible rate. Michelle was able to finally get her hand around the doorknob, but by the time she did, she realized she no longer had the strength to even turn it.
Michelle let go of the doorknob, and let her rat engulfed arm thud heavily to the floor. She watched at the rats now crawled across her chest and up to her face. Two rats began playing tug of war with her bottom lip. She watched as the skin began to tear away from the rest of her mouth, but then couldn’t bear to look another moment. She needed to escape. She needed a different reality. She needed to be somewhere that she could defeat her enemies, and she knew just the place.
The agony of the thousand tearing sensations that had engulfed her entire body now seemed to fade to a mere tingling, as in Michelle’s mind’s eye, she could see her Punky riding atop that flying mount, soaring over canyons, jungles, and deserts.
As she imagined her alter ego rising above it all, she suddenly felt herself become weightless and untethered. The rats must have gone, because now she felt lighter than she’d ever felt before, and though the sun seemed to be setting, casting darkness over the land, it didn’t matter, because up here, no one could hurt her. Here, she was free.
–written by Josh “Radio” Hedge
