It’s Saturday Night…and you check your watch. It is almost seven o’clock. He will be here in less than ten minutes. You hurry to finish dressing, trying on several outfits before finally deciding on a torn, blood-matted gray dress that matches your eyes perfectly. A quick dash of dried blood to your lips and then a subtle trace of a pencil liner to accentuate that long scar running down your left cheek. You turn around in the mirror and smile, noticing the decayed flesh hanging from your right leg. Normally, you would not care about your appearance. But tonight was different.
Tonight, you are meeting him.
You grab your overcoat and head out into the dark night, pausing briefly to savor the stench of decay surrounding the ruined core of downtown Malton. You hear a loud growl echoing into the night, and your heart begins to beat just that much faster. It was him. And he had a reservation at the city’s hottest new restaurant: Club Penfold. Where you first met.
As you crawl through the broken barricades, you think back to that first night. You, a fresh corpse, rummaging through the remains of the ransacked statehouse, and him, an infected firefighter, coughing up blood in the corner. You remember him trying to crawl away from you as you shamble toward him. You always did like when they played hard to get. As your teeth began to tear through his carotid, you remember him screaming in pain and horror, and you feel a warm glow inside you.
Yes, you reflect, he always did know exactly what to say to melt a girl’s heart. This one was definitely a keeper.
You smile as the memory leaves your rotten mind, and you begin to look inside the club for your flame. You catch a scent of a dying policeman in the corner, mixed in with the smell of fear and blood as the harmanz slowly realize that they are not alone. A new scent appears and your heart begins to beat faster. He was there.
But something is different. Something is wrong. He is different. He is wrong.
A dark figure approaches you, two flashes appear in the darkness, and as your broken body crumbles to the floor, you think to yourself, “How could I be so stupid? How could I not see this coming?” He finishes you off with a quick headshot, dumps your body in the street, and walks out the door, leaving you to pick up the pieces of your broken heart and skull.
Let’s face it. We have been there before, thinking that we have found the zombie of our dreams, only to discover that our new love is nothing more than a harman in disguise. So how do you know your new man or woman is committed to being a life-long zombie? Here are some hints that your new flame may not exactly be the one for you:
- They introduce themselves as Zomkiller23, ZedDead5, SlayDeathToonB, or PenultimateZomboApocalypse.
- Their idea of a fun night is to stand around a park, bleating “Mrh?” while swaying back and forth.
- While you are certainly open to spicing things up in the bedroom, you do wonder if bringing twenty loaded shotguns, a portable generator and thirty fire-axes to bed is really necessary.
- Lately you seem to be running out of conversation topics, and his story about being a “lost soul, drifting endlessly in a sea of melancholy and despair toward a chasm of hopelessness and sorrow, who now must avenge the death of his parents by killing every zombie in Malton” is no longer the funny anecdote it used to be.
- He avoids your subtle questions about commitment, why he does not have brainrot and why he has been spending most of his time hanging out at the Thompson Walk Revive Point.
- You have started to wonder if you really want to spend the rest of your unlife with a man whose long-term plan is to cleanse the zombie menace from the suburbs of Stanley Village and Roftwood using the holy, purging fire of long-range howitzers and fuel-air bombs.
Remember, only diamonds and brainrot are forever. Otherwise, last month’s unrotted fling might suddenly become tomorrow’s light morning snack.
