“Gaggagagaggaglglglglglg”
“Talking about Dawn of the Dead with you as a zombie is not going to work.” Kristl remarked. She was sitting on the couch in the garage they had turned into a movie theater.
Henry was shuffling towards her with outstretched arms. He was covered in light grey makeup, dressed in ripped clothing and dripping some glowing red liquid. His face was smeared with what looked like lasagna left over from yesterday’s dinner.
Before his reappearance as corpse Henry had walked out of the room, saying he would be back in a short while. He had also turned on ten screens with ten different stations blasting a stream of images and sounds at her. She had not seen those screens before.
She had waited for ten minutes while the screens showed her news without emotion, soaps with fake emotions, reality television with even faker emotions and a fat guy telling others how to live. And when the corpse appeared she had to suffer another five minutes of it advancing slowly while various television channels entertained her at the same time. Her eyes kept moving from the screens to the zombie and back again.
“Gosh, this is so.. tedious!.” Kristl picked up a cup filled with popcorn and ate some of it while watching Henrys ponderous approach, “I can finish this cup before you are halfway.”
Henry shuffled onwards.
“Oh hell. Do I have to do this on my own?”
She threw the popcorn at Henry. Showering him with it and then threw the cup. It bounced of his head, making Henry flinch. Kristl laughed because some of the popcorn had stuck to his face.
“So dawn has these four people, three guys and a girl, in a huge mall trying to sit out the zombie apocalypse.. A huge mall. A world in itself. They won’t make another movie like this one. I mean it sparked a huge sequel of similar movies that developed the genre and tried to outdo each other by upping the gore element and removing the satire element.”
Henry gurgled loudly.
“You might say that this is even more the father of the zombie movies than Night of the Living Dead.Or would that be the mother?Not that it would be flattering to be the parent of a series of movies that seem mostly to revolve around mindless cadavers eating clueless people..
At this point Kristl stood up and moved around the couch, keeping it between her and the oncoming zombie. The living dead lurched at her, but she was too quick for it, although it almost caught her hair for it somehow had been much closer than she had estimated.
“It surprised me that it wasn’t as gory as I imagined it to be. Most is at the end. It’s as if they added it as an afterthought. But maybe it is because the decades in between birthed such fine upstanding movies as Saw and Saving Private Ryan. It took me some time to find the courage to see this one, so I might even be able to see Saw one day! Maybe I can see it when I am undead too?.”
The corpse had moved around the couch to get at her. Kristl backed off to the other side of the couch. She grinned at the lumbering corpse, the corpse moaned..
“At first I had a hard time to connect to the characters, but eventually they sort of grew on me. Even that dumb helicopter pilot Stephen, who in the end messes up the plan to use the zombies against the gang that raided the mall. All the careful plans go wrong in the end. That Roger guy gets to cocky and ends up being bitten. And Stephen eventually starts shooting at the gang because he gets angry that they loot the place. He forgets that almost everything they steal is worthless. Like one gang member says to that the other when he picks up a television set: what are you going to watch?”
The zombie had moved around the couch again, as had Kristl, but in the opposite direction.
“God Henry. Look at the mess you made. There is red stuff and lasagna all over the floor.” Kristl exclaimed, “Such a waste of good food. And I am the one that is going to clean this!”
Suddenly the garage fell silent as the screens stopped their cacophony of sounds and images and showed the face of Henry. All ten of them.
“You know there might be a gun in the room under the stairs at the end of the corridor.” Said the face of Henry.
“You are on television!”
“We all have guns here. You keep saying that. So if I had one, it might be there, but you have run down that small corridor and the lights are out.” At that moment the few lights in the room turned off as well. Now only the televisions illuminated..
“It might be that there is another zombie there. Maybe two.Who knows? And maybe there is no gun. Or no ammo for it. Or the wrong ammo. Can you actually handle a gun? You can always try to use it as a club. Or use the fire extinguisher. If there is one.”
“ Is there a point to all of this?. This running around in the darkness is not much fun. And what is with the televisions?.I do hope I am not paying for my own anxiety?” Kristl shouted.
“No worries: I am paying and that is all that counts.” Henry grinned at her ten times.
And the zombie moaned loudly when Kristl set her steel-tipped combat boots to work; they were relics from days gone by.
Merit Coba 
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