Rough Writing

Ben picked up a small bottle of seltzer water and pursed his lips. His face was sallow, white and the color of paste. His lips thinned as he looked at the expiration date and then carefully placed the glass bottle into his shopping cart. He had everything stacked in order of how he would put it into his fridge. To say Ben was fastidious was to do fastidiosity and fastiosimdom a disservice. Ben pulled back his brown corduroy jacket to pull out of its soft silk lined pockets a small black notebook. The notebook opened with a crisp sound and after a soft twist of a pen and a swish of ink across paper ben marked another item off of his list. Jenny watched this crazy man thinking what a dull bore this man blocking the aisle was. We don’t care about her, she is merely a blonde attractive woman who dies very suddenly when the zombies come. Don’t worry about the zombies just yet, the plague hasn’t happened yet.

Ben’s day was fairly predictable, he woke, ate, work, slept, woke ad nauseum. He was very much at peace with himself but somewhere back in the corner of his mind were his little fantasies all tightly bound in chains and thrust into a dark cave all wrapped up in a battered blue trunk. Ben was simply put an incredibly boorish fellow who works at a research lab studying specific types of infectious diseases. Little did he know that he was going to be patient zero and future king of the zombies. How twisted.

It was a hot humid summers day when Ben pulled out in his sky blue geo metro onto the road. Kids were running and playing in the sun. Ben pulled away from his cookie cutter neighborhood with its cookie cutter homes and people with cookie cutter lives. Traffic and smog filled his morning as he mindlessly zombied his way into work. On his way in he felt a little uptick in his heart rate as he saw the pretty brunette receptionist Lisa but as always he had no courage to actually talk to her and only mumbled and stupidly grinned when she said good morning while flashing her pearly whites and a little cleavage.

Ben hurried in past Lisa and towards the locker room to go through decontamination and get suited up for the day. Carefully he folded his socks into his shoes and hung his shirt in his locker. With a lock and a click he turned from the steel grey doors and adjusted his isolation suit and headed for the entrance into the lab. Ben entered the quiet sterile lab and proceeded to examine how his cultures were doing. Petri dish after petri dish examined with notations added to the digital logs. The hours began to blur. He stood looking through a microscope at a slice of a brain tissue and the culture from its cells. Something very odd was going on. Suddenly a slight vibration began making it hard to focus. Ben looked up irritated to glare at Tom who had a nervous twitch. Tom wasn’t there. The slight vibration increased in intensity and the rattling of glass jars, petri dishes and rose to a crescendo as pieces began falling and shattering on the floor.

Tables and chairs also began to fall over as the tiled floor beneath Ben bucked and heaved. Cracks appeared all over and Ben was thrown into a specimen case and blacked out.