At Least He's Not On Fire: A Tour of the Things That Escape My Head by Chris Philbrook

veggies and that righteously yummy canned brown bread you eat with beans. I also got the beans to go with it. Sneaky motherfucker that I am I slipped behind the deli counter when the clerks weren’t looking and grabbed a few whole, still sealed slabs of meat. One each of turkey, ham and bologna.  
    Sooooo… my shamefulness comes back. The deli is kinda near the exit and it took about two seconds of deliberation before I decided I was going to walk the fuck out without paying. What were they going to do anyway? Every employee had either left already, or was gooch-deep in customers. The only shitty problem was that my groceries would not be bagged. Not a real problem. I’ll deal with that.  
    Out the door I went, snagging two bunches of bananas on the way. Outside things had gotten much fucking worse. Our grocery store patron who had been creamed by the soccer mom in her minivan was not doing well at all. Actually he had died, and someone had thrown a heavy duty blanket over him. One of those gray, industrial blankets people steal out of the back of moving trucks. I gave the crowd around his body a wide berth and made it about fifty more feet before I heard them start screaming. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, and watched the crowd scatter like dandelion fluff in the wind. I have never seen such fat people move with such vigor before. One lady with a mega-fupa was literally tearing up pavement as she ran. I still laugh today thinking of her jiggling rolls as she nearly ate shit getting into her far too small compact car. It might’ve been the springs, but I swear to this day I heard her car cry out in pain when she got in it.
    Anyway, our poor accident victim had sat back up. From my angle at the time he was kind of facing away from me, and he still had the blanket covering his front side. He was blind basically with the blanket over his face. Morbid curiosity found me unslinging the shotgun, and approaching the dude. I racked up a round in the chamber and slowly circled him at about ten feet. You could just tell from his body language that he was fucked up. Plus he was making this rattling noise with his quasi-breathing that was just not normal. Well that’s not entirely true. Ever give someone CPR? Frequently when you’re giving real CPR air gets down into the stomach. When the air escapes it sometimes does this burpish-gurgle deal that’s kind of unsettling. It’s the death-rattle you read about. This dude was doing it, and he was moving around at the same time. Didn’t make sense. I knew what it really meant though.
    Just about when I got to his 10 o’clock the blanket slipped off his face, and I saw my first zombie. He was lit the fuck up. That accident had made him royally fucking nasty, and add to that all his color had drained away. His skin was this ashen white with a blue tinge. Dried blood crusted the edge of his mouth. He tried to stand up to come at me but both his legs were shattered. He kinda half fell over in my direction and face planted on the pavement. I remember laughing nervously when he started crawling at me because I saw his face had left a bloody wet mark where it had hit down.
    His eyes had totally glazed over and were almost whitish-grey. He wasn’t moaning like they do in the movies either. It makes a lot of sense now that I’ve seen so many real zombies. Moaning requires breathing, and these things do not breathe. Once he had finished his charming death-rattle, he was silent. That’s actually one of the things that keeps me up at night. If you don’t hear the shuffling of their feet, see them coming, or smell them coming, they are almost entirely silent.
    After I made the mental decision that this man was indeed a newly minted zombie I took a deep breath, drew a bead on his face, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger. The Mossberg bucked hard, and I felt something hit the front of my pants. I opened my eyes and saw that his face was totally annihilated, and some of the