ZERO

Hello whoever may be reading this. If there is anyone left to read this. My name is Eric Schupp. I’m holed up in a warehouse in the western United States. Not even sure which state I’m in. It doesn’t matter, either way you have to know. Know what happened to the world and how it happened.

Let’s start at the beginning. Well maybe a little before that. 

It was the early 2000s and I was in college. My major was business management, just so you have an idea of just how much of a cliche I am. I had dreams of starting fortune 500 companies just like the other 4800 students studying the same thing I was at my school. I met a girl that was way out of my league but played up my dreams and got lucky. After school we got married and I started trying my hand at entrepreneurship. In other words I was unemployed for a year after school. That strained our marriage so I took a desk job at one of those fortune 500 companies I was going to start. I hated it so I did the bare minimum. My life was exactly as boring as you think it was. 

As Ede dragged on I realized that my wife, Denise, was getting restless. I wanted to make some exaggerated effort to win her affection again. So I took her out the Red Lobster and told her I wanted to go on a trip. I proposed Sante Fe, she cried, so I thought it was a win. We went on our trip, and made pottery and got to go to Native American tribal land and met with their medicine man. He did some things and told me my fortune. Something about a dark path and being tainted. Deniseseemed into it, but I didn’t buy a thing he said. After the trip Denise still seemed bored.

Finally a few years later I got a promotion. Not sure how, I never stopped doing the bare minimum. We took the money from my raise and bought a nice house in the hills. That definitely had to make Denise happy. Right?

That brings us to the beginning of the end. One of the many days I spent pretending to watch TV while I looked at social media on my phone, my neighbor stopped by. Denise answered the door and I heard hushed whispers from the hall. I went to see what they were whispering about and I saw them kiss. My blood boiled. I’m not a very angry man, and I’m certainly not an aggressive one. But this seemed different. Scary almost. I quickly ducked behind the wall so Denise wouldn’t know that I’d seen. Then after she went to bed I snuck over to the neighbor’s house and broke in. I don’t know what I intended but it was bad. While I was standing over his bed watching him sleep so soundly I imagined horrible ways to kill him. At least I thought I imagined those things.

The next morning I woke up in a lawn chair next to my pool covered in blood. Fortunately Denise was still asleep. I threw the lawn chair in our garbage can and quickly took a shower. I was planning to go have a look at Ed’s house, that was our neighbor, when Denise woke up. I made pretend that I was getting ready my usual way and left to go to work. Somehow as I was leaving I saw Ed leaving his house. I sighed a huge sigh of relief. I didn’t know where the blood came from but I could worry about that later.

At lunch that day I went to my favorite sports bar. I don’t like sports, but I did love their chicken wings. There was a breaking news story and the cops had surrounded a country club. Someone had gone absolutely nuts and killed a bunch of people inside. It turns out that the people who were killed came back and killed a bunch of the cops. It had begun. I didn’t even blink. I assumed it was some weird virus that was now contained and we could go back to bitching about it on social media while taking pictures of our lunch. I was wrong. That was the day that the world would change. But I think I had already changed, I just didn’t know it yet.

That night I came home and Denise was sitting on the couch crying. She said that some of her colleagues had been at that country club. I hugged her and told her I was sorry but I was kind of glad to see her cry. She had been cheating on me. I went to my home office and watched porn after she went to sleep. Then it hit me. Where did that blood come from? I snuck back over to Ed’s house. It was dark and empty. There was one bloody handprint on the back wall next to a broken window. I thought maybe I cut my arm breaking in, but I didn’t have a cut. I jumped through the window and looked around. There was blood in his bathtub. I couldn’t make sense of it. He wasn’t here and I for sure saw him leave. So I cleaned the tub and went home. I layed down next to Denise and tried to sleep. I couldn’t, in fact I haven’t since then. All I could do was stare at the ceiling while the sound of bugs crawling on my brain made me crazy.

That was a month ago.