End of the World Afterparty: Part One

ABOUT THIS BOOK

 

Back in 2019, my friend and I played a game together. Probably there’s some official version you can buy, but this is the way she taught me to set it up. Grab a bunch of scrap paper and take turns writing down types of people/professions, such as dentist or housewife. On another pile of scrap paper, write down attributes, such as “accidentally time travels every time they sneeze” or “has uncontrollable diarrhea” or “knows how to make delicious food but can only walk backwards.” To play, you draw one piece of paper from each pile until you have an assortment of characters and attributes: “a lawyer who believes daisies cause cancer,” “an electrician who likes licking doorknobs,” or “my mom, but only on Tuesdays.”

It’s up to you how many characters you want to create. Your goal is to come up with a scenario: you could be trying to survive twenty years in a bunker after a nuclear disaster, you could be scrambling to shore up your deep sea base before it implodes—your options are only limited by your imagination. Out of your people, you have to decide the five individuals you think will help you stay alive, weighing in the balance your pros and cons. 

The scenario my friend and I chose was surviving the night in a farmhouse during a zombie apocalypse. These were our characters: 

The president of the United States is a necrophiliac

A Bear Grylls-type character who has ten years of tactical and combat experience and believes that the zombie virus is caused by vaccines

A sign waver who is a time traveling assassin from the 1870’s

Captain America, who sneezes when he sees the color green

A popular, obnoxious Youtuber who can devise booby traps and catapults and develop weapons on the run but mansplains everything and won’t shut up about how great America is

An author who has killed at least five hundred people, but no one knows how

A refrigerator salesman (and part-time sheep thief) who thinks that the zombies are just normal humans in stage makeup

A farmer’s wife who gets really hangry and forgets how to talk to other people 

A muralist who throws cats at their enemies as distractions so they can escape

An army general who laughs uncontrollably when they get nervous or scared

Someone who writes and self-publishes erotica and is afraid of drowning on dry land

A Brazilian Jiujitsu teacher and black belt who believes they’re dying of the Spanish flu but they’re completely fine

A conspiracy theorist who definitely knows what they are doing because “this is just like the video games” 

A professional coaster designer who turns into a cat whenever they’re scared. 

My friend and I liked the characters so much, she told me I had to turn the set up into a book. Here it is. 

It was a ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek creative writing challenge which I didn’t expect to turn into anything worthwhile, but about halfway through I started taking it somewhat seriously. 

This is the story of Singh, a video game streamer/conspiracy fanatic who leaves her house one morning to buy groceries and ends up skateboarding past zombie apocalypse ground zero. With a hefty dose of humor and gore, it has been described (by me) as “this turned out better than I’d expected” and also “I will die of mortification if anyone ever reads this.” 

So now, before I can convince myself this is a bad idea, I present to you: 

END OF THE WORLD AFTERPARTY, 

By Elizabeth Brooks

 

CHAPTER ONE

<Begin Recording>

The zombie apocalypse may have started when the local juice shop opened, but I’m thinking that after the cleanup is finished—if it’s ever finished—we’re going to find out the government was involved. 

Here I am, skimming the hours of footage Jason took throughout the whole ordeal. Most of it’s useless, because Jason Vanderbilt was useless, and he was too self-absorbed to tell a good story. That’s not the only reason I’m glad he’s dead, but it’s on the list. 

Yes, I know—I’m getting ahead of myself. My head’s a whole mess. On some level it might be easier if I shared the whole thing from memory, but there’s footage that fills in the gaps, moments Jason witnessed and captured that I didn’t, and it’s more cinematic this way. With all the material he left, I have enough to put together a feature-length film about our ordeal; might even get an award or something. It’s what Jason would have wanted. 

Screw Jason, though. Screw all of them. Seriously. Bunch of idiots, running around getting themselves killed, getting other people killed. I guess I should tell you up front, because there’s no use pretending it isn’t the case: out of the eight of us who banded together in Jason’s farmhouse, I’m the last one standing. So—go me, I guess. 

Right now, I’m looking at the first useful shot. Before I skip ahead to the most relevant time stamp, I’ll fill you in on the context. Well actually, I have to do a bit more than that, because you don’t even know who I am or who any of these people were, and you don’t know why you should care. I’m not good at this, and you deserve a better narrator. I think everyone deserves a better narrator.   

As a Youtube phenomenon, Jason Vanderbilt managed to amass a following in the double-digit millions. Maybe it was the perpetual cloud of controversy hanging over his head, or maybe it was the casual arrogance oozing from his pores, but I never saw the appeal. 

Though my numbers never rivaled his, I had my own small share of YouTube followers, those who preferred to watch my video game streams there rather than on Twitch. I always kept my username gender-neutral (FastidiousLore732), altered my voice, and never showed my face, because you wouldn’t believe the amount of fetishization you encounter as an Asian gamer girl. People thought I did it to be mysterious, so I took advantage of that. 

Jason, however—well, they say that love is blind, and there is no love quite so blind as the sightless adoration his fans held for him. Despite his criminal record and the never-ending list of unethical stunts he pulled for attention, (or maybe because of those things) there was never a shortage of tweenagers and jobless kidults slobbering over him at his meet-and-greets. Nobody seemed to care what he did, not even the law, because his parents were Big Money and his ads brought in revenue streams that made Bezos look like an amateur, probably. 

Wonder how Bezos is doing right now. Probably locked down in some cushy bunker in Hawaii, watching the apocalypse livestream…

Focus, Singh. 

Before all this, Jason and his agents had been in talks with big studio execs about making a movie based on his rise to power or whatever. Guess I’m big studio execs now. Can honestly say I never saw that one coming. 

So let’s get to our first clip. The shot opens onto Earth Joy, a tiny juice shop that sells smoothies and frozen coconut yogurt. All the ingredients are healthy, and by that I mean they are exotic and weird, so that must mean they’re good for you. Baobab inclusion? Isn’t that a kind of tree in Africa? Why would I pay seventeen dollars for a tree smoothie? Bet you some think tank sits around and concludes that the stranger the ingredients sound the more the almond moms of this world just have to try them, and you can’t even get mad, because they’re right. 

Here’s the thing, though. That’s funny and all until you realize one of the ingredients they offered in their smoothies was cordyceps. Fairly common, I know. Meant to relax you or supplement your sexual stamina, depending on who you’re listening to. If that’s not ringing a bell, maybe you’ve heard about ants getting hijacked and zombified by a fungus which makes them climb tall trees, sprout mycelial threads from their burst abdomens, and drop spores on all the hapless ants below, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle. If you’re still drawing a blank, I can safely say that you’re a boring person, and we would never have gotten along in real life, so it doesn’t matter what you think anyway. 

Scientists say even as the fungus cracks open the ant’s exoskeleton and sprouts its long, phallic stalks, the ant remains alive—trapped and helpless; the wheel’s still there, but the road’s taken over. That, my friends, is cordyceps. I bet you’re feeling healthier already. Bet you want to drink a whole smoothie full of that. Give me some parasitic fungus any day, I can hear you saying. Let me climb onto a roof and do my little fungus dance. 

You’ve probably at least heard of The Last of Us (you could go back and watch my play through, if, you know, the internet still exists by the time you see this). Or maybe you’ve read The Girl With All the Gifts. And I get it. Those are science fiction, emphasis on fiction. Something that preys on ants and other insects—and even other fungi—isn’t built to prey on humans. That’s just not how genetics works. Each specific strain has its own specific target, and despite depictions in media and the occasional freak illness like ebola, zoonotic diseases are rare. More than that, they never jump the species barrier without outside help; don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. 

I can already hear someone in their living room, yelling into a crappy camera, “What does she think she’s talking about? If we’re going to have a zombie apocalypse, it would be caused by prions. It would be mad cow disease on steroids. Everyone knows that chronic wasting disease is spreading like wildfire through the deer population and will infect humans any day now—those hunters will be the death of us.” 

Blah, blah, blah, etc…

Hate to burst your bubble: prions don’t work that fast. But maybe I don’t buy the fungus explanation, either. It could have been a virus. Or nanites controlled by emergent consciousness in AI. Some strange bacteria from a piece of poorly-washed fruit. Could have been anything. Here, let me just whip out my handy microscope, and I can solve this right away. I carry it everywhere I go for this exact reason. 

…

…

What I’m trying to say is, maybe some scientist did mess around with good old cordyceps, because why not? And then maybe someone else dropped a petri dish, or sneezed at exactly the wrong moment, wiped their nose when they shouldn’t have, touched a slide and then forgot to disinfect. Wouldn’t be the first time. Dude, I had a friend who used to work at a lab, and he got fired for licking the incubated samples on a dare, so I would not put anything past anyone at this point. 

It would explain why the news anchors knew the cause of the outbreak so early on. Don’t try to tell me their investigative journalists were able to dig that up so quickly on their own. 

When it comes to shady government-run experiments, Leesburg, Virginia doesn’t have the squeakiest history. Ever since the dossiers concerning MK-ULTRA were released, including all the places they crop-dusted with chemicals as part of their mind-control tests, I don’t doubt the government’s ability to prey on its own people, even near the Capitol. Maybe especially near the Capitol—friends close, enemies closer kind of deal. 

I guess I should have mentioned earlier that my whole shtick when it came to my streams was that I would talk about conspiracy theories while I played video games—all the way from “Bush did 9/11” to “aliens have replaced the top ten percent of our elite”—and I lived for the moments my viewers brought up theories I’d never heard of. I’m going to miss those days…

…

…

Back to the clip. Jason is filming himself in line at Earth Joy, talking about this prank he’s going to pull like it’s the most clever thing ever. (Spoiler alert: It’s not.) He has a dead cockroach in his pocket, and he’s planning to put it in his smoothie and make a huge scene. Beyond that, I’m not sure if his endgame is media attention and money, or if he’s content with simply watching the juice shop burn. Regardless, it’s a good thing he was there, because he got a better shot than anything that ended up on the news. 

(For other reasons, it was bad he was there, but we’ll get to that.) 

Since the line to get inside is already twenty people deep, he’s stuck waiting outside. (Now that he’s dead, it’s weird seeing him alive. I imagine this is what having an out-of-body experience feels like.) 

The fact that he’s outside is likely the reason he’s gotten away with talking so openly about his prank thus far. It’s also definitely the reason he survived the first wave of the infected. 

The line’s moving slowly for some reason. Earlier, when Jason got here, it had been zipping along. But according to him, he’s been here for an hour now, and the footage corroborates this. 

If I didn’t know what happened next, I would have assumed they were simply understaffed and unprepared for such an influx of people. (But for real, who stands that long in line for smoothies? Like, OMG, get a life.) 

…

…

Sorry, too soon. 

…

…

In the distance, you can hear sirens. But before the approaching ambulance becomes the temporary focus of attention, several people near the front of the line start shouting. 

An employee pushes her way out the door. At first it looks like she’s heading out to meet the ambulance, and people start shifting around when they put two and two together and determine that the line has stalled because of an emergency. Had I been standing there, I know I would have been pretty anxious, even without realizing how bad it actually was. But of course Jason is eating this up and coming back for seconds. 

The employee clears her throat and starts speaking in what I assume is meant to be a calm, authoritative voice, but instead she sounds on the verge of tears. “All right, people. We have to close for the day due to unforeseen circumstances. I’m terribly sorry. Please come back tomorrow.” 

The third time I replayed the video, I saw what I’d missed before, that she’s reading from her hand, words scrawled across her palm in sharpie like jagged wounds, bleeding black. It chills me when I try to run through the sequence of events, everything that happened in that building, and then everything that came next. According to the news, we’ll never know just exactly how shit went down. We have only what we can gather from our reconstructions and from the people who were there on the outside. Everyone who was inside Earth Joy Juice Shop when the ambulance arrived is dead. 

As the shouting behind the employee rises to a crescendo, it starts to sound less like yelling and more like screaming. Even at this point, Jason remains laser-focused on cracking stupid jokes, so it’s hard to make out what everyone else has to say. The crowd stirs and thins around him. Several people start to drift away, irritated or disappointed or simply uninterested in the unfolding drama. But more press closer to the shop, leaning in toward the ambulance like rubberneckers at a car wreck, there to ogle the rising smoke and the bleeding bodies. 

Finally Jason’s Youtuber instincts kick into high gear as he realizes that if he can get a decent shot, this will make a way better video than what he had planned. So he elbows his way through the growing crowd of spectators pressing in from all directions. 

You can hear the yelling more clearly as he gets closer. I don’t know if you’ve ventured onto the scary side of Youtube. If you’ve listened to recordings from the true exorcism of Anneliese Michel, you’ll know what I’m talking about: the guttural tones, the gravelly shrieks, like something crying out from the center of hell. Having heard those screams up close now, I can’t tell you why listening to them on tape is the worst part of this whole experience, but somehow it is. It activates something in my hindbrain, telling me to run while at the same time assuring me there’s nowhere to hide. 

This is the point where some of the people who’ve stuck around get the idea that maybe this isn’t your everyday emergency, that possibly there is an insane/possessed person or two inside, and that maybe it would be better to make like a tree and leave. A lot of people do. One girl is hugging herself, and her boyfriend (brother? friend?) is kind of rubbing her back even though he looks like he’s just been to war. I wonder what happened to them, if they made it out safely, if they found shelter in time. 

Now Jason’s able to get even closer to the action, but there’s still a dense knot of people shielding the entrance of the building from view. The ambulance crew have already forced their way inside, and now a police car pulls up to the curb—you can see the push bar at the bottom corner of the frame. 

All of a sudden the knot of bodies breaks apart, and people wheel away screaming. I had to watch the video in slow motion to get a feel for what happened, to map it out. One woman stumbles away with blood streaming down her face and careens off another person before slumping to the ground, her arms jerking in a jagged semaphore, an inarticulate dance whose meaning can only be read far too late. 

Then a pair of EMTs appears in the doorway, hunched over and locked in combat. At first you don’t realize what they’re doing, mainly because the woman they’re attempting to restrain isn’t acting like a person. Her hands grab out every which way, fingers unnaturally stiff, knuckles bent. Everything about how she holds herself is uncanny, like the drunken stagger of a rabid animal, but even more wrong. Then she clamps her teeth into the taller EMT’s bicep, right through his windbreaker, and rips out the muscle like it’s slow-cooked meat falling off the bone. When he falls down, howling and clutching at the blood-slicked thing that was his arm, she goes for the throat. I’ve seen wild dogs with better table manners. 

If I hadn’t already witnessed so many deaths by the time I found this clip, it might have broken me. And experience aside, it’s still hard to watch. Best I can do is create a barrier for myself by pretending this is nothing more than a sick, twisted video game with impeccably-rendered graphics. Sometimes it even helps. 

Amazingly, Jason is still laughing like it’s a prank, although I should point out that his idea of a prank once involved feeding a homeless man tuna sandwiches filled with broken glass, so it’s unclear if he thinks these are street performers or if he believes this is legitimate and loves it anyway. And before you start arguing that no one could possibly be that callous, like Piper592luvsJason4ever does in every comment section of every stream, save your breath and wait till the end, after I’ve told you the rest of the story. Then you can decide. But as for me, I know where I stand. 

(Over Jason’s corpse. I am literally standing over Jason’s corpse.) 

…

…

Sorry, that was meant to be funny. It’s…uh…it’s been a long few days.

Here’s my best attempt at explaining what happened in Earth Joy Juice Shop. I peeped on their Facebook page that they have a decent amount of seating—several small tables and a line of chairs along the bar. I’m guessing a couple almond moms with nothing else to do set up camp at the very beginning and spent the next couple of hours yakking away while the fungus reached a tipping point, and then a cascade. Probably at least one of them started to have a seizure—or what looked like a seizure. Someone called an ambulance, and then shortly after, a police car, too, because almond mom woke up hangry. 

Not very live, laugh, love of her. 

As for the rest of the clip, the cops descend in force, and that’s when Jason backs off, but it’s also when shit starts getting interesting (and you thought it was interesting before). One of the cops—a burly, meathead guy—tases the woman, who by this point has already moved on to one of the juice shop employees (funny, because I didn’t realize the employees were also on the menu). She doesn’t flinch when the prongs embed themselves in her back, doesn’t react as the electricity courses through her body. She’s so uninterested in the cop, so distracted by her kill, he might as well be a child tugging on her skirt while she’s locked in a heated argument. But finally she does look up, still chewing on part of that poor girl’s face, with blood smeared on her cheeks and pieces of skin and fat stuck to her lips. 

For a moment she looks, absurdly, like a ruminating cow. Then her gaze lands on the cop—here’s where you can see that the pupils have gone gray, the irises and the whites, too. She becomes nothing more than a blur of motion as she tackles him, and even when another cop shoots her point blank in the head, her body keeps moving for a couple seconds longer, jerking and grabbing and clawing. This is the point where Jason, for maybe the first time in his life, does something wise. He runs away. So the remaining footage is blurry and impossible to watch without getting motion sickness. 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Now that you’ve gotten a taste of the action, you might be wondering where I come in, or who I am in relation to Jason. So far, if you’ve been paying attention, you know I go by Singh. That’s how I introduced myself to Jason and company, but it’s not my name. I never post my name online. 

Like Jason, I’m twenty-four and I live at home with my mom. (Well…lived, I guess.) Before you assume that I’m the stereotypical kidult failure-to-launch hanging out in her parent’s basement, playing video games, and avoiding work, you should know that I really did try to make it happen the acceptable way. Three times I got fired from entry-level office jobs for voicing my conspiracy theories at work, and you could argue that I should’ve learned my lesson the first time, but please tell me how bringing up my concerns about the lizard person masquerading as our commander-in-chief warrants getting written up for “disruptive influences not conducive to a healthy work environment.” What else am I supposed to talk about in the break room? The weather? 

My best guess is my bosses were scared because I was getting a little too close to the truth, or maybe the government itself stepped in and told them to get rid of me. They’ll do anything to silence the ones who know too much. Regardless, I’ve been between jobs for a while now, and not for lack of trying, which is why I know I’ve been blacklisted. But I made enough money from Youtube and Twitch to pay my mom something approximating rent, and I buy my own half of the groceries, so SimpsonCleaver1292 has no business calling me a parasite. Blocked and reported. 

Anyway, that’s where I was when shit hit the fan, out buying groceries. Mom was planning to make cookies but needed butter and eggs. Helpful daughter that I am, I volunteered to skateboard over to the local Giant. When I passed the juice shop en route, I saw a line of bored people snaking around the block and some joker filming himself and laughing obnoxiously. I remember feeling like I should have recognized him somehow, but I don’t tend to give douchewads a second look, and this was no exception. Probably I didn’t know who he was because I so thoroughly did not expect to see him out of context, in the real world, in my town. 

On my way back from the store, the whole scene was different. A lady was fighting a cop, and I mean, she was going at it, biting and clawing, teeth snapping at anything in range. Judging by the tangle of wires protruding from her back, they would have had better luck clobbering her with the taser itself. I was still trying to figure out exactly what I was looking at—it was all so unreal—when I collided with Jason. Actually, if we’re being accurate, he ran into me. With his car. 

There I lay, spread-eagle on the pavement, a sticky warmth spreading across my knees and elbows that I knew had to be blood. The sky spun in lazy circles, clouds and lampposts blurring, merging, only to split apart and triple in number. My groceries surrounded me like so much confetti. And somehow all I could think was that getting hit by a car was anticlimactic. 

My ears rang and my head pounded; I’d smacked it pretty good, maybe even hard enough to give myself a concussion, although Jason couldn’t have been going very fast. As far as I could tell, nothing was broken, not that I felt like moving anytime soon. There was gravel in my hair, and I didn’t know where my skateboard was. Also I knew that as soon as I saw the crowd of people who were surely staring at me, I was going to die of embarrassment. Already, I’d forgotten about the lady fighting with the cop. 

Jason’s head came into view, his mouth open like he was shouting, and then all the sound in the world collapsed in on me, and I recognized him. That’s when I actually thought, for a second or two, that I’d died and gone to hell. 

“What are you doing? You need to get up!” 

Maybe, I wondered, he’s freaking out because he thinks he’s killed me, and he’s worried about going to jail, and I should pretend to be terribly injured so I can get lots of money from him. 

But the incoherent screaming threatened to drown out his voice like something out of a movie, the soundtrack to some great disaster, and I started to get a really bad feeling. Was I mortally wounded and unable to feel it because I was going into shock? Had I been smeared across the asphalt like a meat crayon, and the pain just wasn’t reaching me because all my nerve endings were gone? 

Didn’t take me long to realize it was worse than that. 

This time he didn’t say anything, he just hoisted me into his arms like he wasn’t at all worried that I might have broken my back (lawsuit, bayybee), dumped me unceremoniously into the passenger seat of his silver Porsche, and reached across me to buckle my seatbelt. Then, before I could protest, he gunned the engine and sped off down the road. Driving like that, I figured it was only a matter of time before he hit someone else. 

When I reached up to feel the side of my head, it was warm and wet, and my hand came away red. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded. My skateboard was somewhere back there, and if I didn’t get home soon, Mom was going to worry about me. I needed to change my clothes, needed to shower off the blood. I probably needed staples. 

I pulled my phone out of my pocket, but the screen was shattered, and I couldn’t get it to wake up. “Are you kidnapping me?” I snapped. I sounded more irritated than anything. Getting kidnapped when you have somewhere to be is very inconvenient, and as upset as I was, I didn’t yet appreciate the full extent of the danger I was in. It takes a lot longer than you might think to catch up with what’s happening to you. 

Instead of answering, he swerved around another corner, nearly giving me whiplash. I thought about jumping from the moving vehicle, but then he merged onto Route Seven and I saw the speedometer creep up to eighty, so I just dug my fingers into the upholstery and tried not to let the wind steal my breath away. 

“Okay, seriously, where are you taking me? I don’t think this is the right direction for the hospital, if that’s where you’re going. That’s East Seven. This is West.” I had to yell to be heard over the roar of the rushing air and the sound of Money For Nothing blaring from the 911’s speakers. 

“I’m not taking you to the hospital, dummy. I’m taking you to the safest place on earth. Didn’t you see what was happening back there?” 

I had no frame of reference to interpret what I’d witnessed, so it floated around in my head like something out of a fever dream, warping and shifting until it meant nothing. Every time I tried to poke at it, I felt a rising wave of nausea, threatening to ruin Jason’s cloth seats. “I was a little busy getting hit by a car,” I said, although I could still hear the screaming in the back of my mind, could still see the woman grappling with the cop, while my brain fought tirelessly to fend off the memory. 

“This isn’t just a car, it’s a Porsche 911 Cabriolet, 3.8 liter, 6-cylinder, manual transmission, 640 horse—”

“You know what?” I said, channeling my confusion into anger. “Just drop me off on the side of the road, and I’ll walk back. I won’t even call the cops.” 

“Don’t tell me you didn’t see the lady eating that guy. You were too busy looking at her to get out of my way. I was honking at you, dumbass.” 

I started to shake all over, just out of the blue. When I tried to think about her, my thoughts shifted to my skateboard instead, how it was probably lying somewhere in the middle of the street for anyone to take or throw away. I’d spent long hours painting it, and I’d been proud of the outcome. I was worried it had been broken. 

“We have to go back and get my skateboard,” I insisted, before I could stop myself. 

He laughed, but it sounded somewhere along the spectrum of hysterical. “If we go back, your skateboard will be the least of your worries. Those were zombies, actual zombies. I cannot believe I got that on camera.” 

“No,” I insisted. There was a lot I’d have believed at that point, but a zombie apocalypse was still too far-fetched, even for me. Just goes to show you the deep end only gets deeper. 

“Undead people. Flesh-eating monsters that used to be human. Don’t tell me you don’t know what a zombie is. If they bite you, you turn into one of them.” 

“I know what a zombie is,” I snapped. He swerved a little, and my breath hitched in my throat. We were going ninety now. I kept hoping a cop would pull us over so I could escape. “You don’t have to explain that to me. I just think you’re full of crap. Zombies aren’t real.”

“Well, the ones back there were real enough. And if I take you to get your skateboard, they will eat you, and then they will eat me. But if we go to my house, which is where we are going, we’ll be safe, because I have guns. Lots of guns. And guns kill zombies.” 

“You don’t have to talk to me like I’m stupid. My brain’s not leaking out my ears.” Though once the thought had entered my mind, I did have to check. 

“‘Merica!” he yelled, tossing his head back, his wavy golden hair dancing in the wind. I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me. He seemed caught in some private ecstasy I wanted no part of. 

Eventually he left the highway, which was thick with traffic, behind us, and followed a winding tangle of side roads and back ways, at last turning onto a gravel drive, which he crept down at ten miles per hour. At that point we’d been stuck in the car for at least thirty minutes, maybe more, and I’d lost track of where we were or how to retrace my steps. 

I rolled my eyes. “If we’re really in danger, you can drive faster. The zombies,” I put air quotes around the word, “won’t care that you don’t want to mess up your Porsche on a pothole. They will reach in and eat us.” 

“You worry too much,” he said, but when we pulled up to his house, he parked the car directly in front of the door and climbed halfway out before killing the engine. 

The building was surprisingly small. Up until that point, I’d spent exactly zero minutes imagining the various aspects of Jason’s existence beyond what he showed on his channel, but if I had, I wouldn’t have pictured him living in a house that bordered on miniscule. I would have assumed he’d own something sprawling and open with a wrap-around balcony, too many windows, and probably an outdoor pool. But this building could have been mistaken for an 1800’s farmhouse in the Ozarks. 

The wood siding was gray and weathered, and there were patches on the roof where the shingles had given up the ghost. All around, the trees leaned in close as if listening to a secret only they could hear. 

I was still reeling. The part of my brain that lived in denial remained at the wheel. But I remember thinking that this place had better be a fortress, because if there actually were zombies out there, we wouldn’t see them coming through the trees until they were pretty much in our laps. 

I thought about running off, even then, when I still believed his worst attributes were arrogance and stupidity and I didn’t understand how much danger I was in. But I needed to use his phone to call someone to pick me up, since mine was broken. And there was no way I was walking back to my house. Even ignoring Jason’s claims about zombies, the woods were forbidding and watchful, and I didn’t want to spend another moment outside. Looking at them, I could actually picture the undead, real and present, emerging from the greenery, and I got chills down my spine when I considered it. 

So that’s how I ended up inside Jason Vanderbilt’s house the first time. 

 

Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Brooks