Dead eyes
Rain. Again. All gray. No wonder.
The view from my bedroom window has seen nothing but gray smoke for years back. Ever since the explosion. The constant tapping of rain on the glass has become a sound so natural, that without it I think I would go crazy. I think I would not be able to cope with the silence. I wish to see the horizon once again. Will I ever?
I turned on the TV. News. There you have it, more gray, an orgy of gray. A lot of colors, a lot of lies, but gray still. Pain and suffering wrapped in a nice colorful piece of paper, reeks with grayness because it's the same shit, but just a different day. Another zombie attack. They are happening more and more often. It might even be a good thing, maybe some color will come out of this gray blob our city has turned into, even if the color would be a bright arterial bloody red. The weather forecast has lost it's sense, they are not even talking about the weather, just about the number of days we spent without sun. It's the year 2114, up to date, 3257 days have passed since the explosion, and no man standing on earth has seen the sun since.
I do remember the sun. The sunset, that day before the explosion. It was magnificent, a symphony of colors, a definition of joy drawn by the force of nature. Everyone slept peacefully that night, as usual, as if the world will not end tomorrow. And tomorrow, everything changed.
It began as a devastating earthquake, soon turned out to be the eruption of the biggest underwater volcano on earth, which in line caused more earthquakes all over the world, and even more volcanic eruptions. Caused tsunamis that brought New York and half of the Nederlands under water, devastation all over Europe and Asia, but the worse was the power failure that caused chain reaction of the nuclear power plants in Japan. The island of Japan was no more, the fallout took millions of victims, the earthquakes and volcanic activities did not stop for weeks, gray dust and ashes covered the earth. And then, just as humanity thought that it was over... the disease came.
People turned into zombies. Don't get me wrong, this was not your typical horror movie-like zombie that eats brains.The people simply...started turning off, lose their interest in life. One day they were alive, talking about how screwed up it is to live in a world damaged like this, the next one, they would start losing their will about anything, bad cases would stop going to work, talking, communicating... living... the worst cases would even stop moving, and eventually, they would die from malnutrition. The easiest way to recognize a zombie is to look them in their eyes, cause no matter what color their eyes were before they got sick, the moment the disease would get them, their eyes were getting a shade of azure blue. I call it the color of death. Looking them into their dead blue eyes, was causing a chill to run down my spine. It was like looking into the deepest of the voids, which was trying to suck out the soul out of me.
And so the world adapted. Humanity tried to find the cure, without success till this day. Meanwhile, the zombie disease was spreading, more and more people lost their will to live, they would sit down in the park or in a cafe, staring into a distant point with their dead eyes, and then after a while they would get up and move on.The doctors were saying that, for the infected, the best way to fight the illness was to try and stay integrated into the society, if possible work any kind of a job, meet and interact with people, stay in as much contact with the world as possible, to slow down the progress of the illness. And sometimes it would help....but lately, more often, it would make them aggressive, violent, as if the illness would rather self-destruct the host then let them become alive again.Such cases would, in a furious outburst of rage, attack anything and everything in their vicinity, and many times it ended in fatalities. This is where I come in.
My parents never had much faith in me.I was a college dropout, in constant conflict with the authorities, and I never understood why is this so, until after the explosion: I simply did not know what am I good at. But now, I found my place. I am a part of a special unit called "The Pacifiers", and my job is to help reintegrate the infected into the society, but also, by any means necessary, protect the remaining healthy men, women and children out there, to pacify each and any zombie outburst.
In this gray new world, I am the one trying to keep the steering wheel straight, in the midst of all of this grayness and bitterness, day in and day out. And this is how my days begin - staring at the grayness and hoping for a ray of sunlight. Until that ray comes, I will do my duty, I will not stop, I will never abandon hope that maybe the sun will bring light into those dead eyes, convince them to come back among the living, to spark a quantum of hope in them as well. I will go out there today, sit in the coffee bars with them, talk to them, look them straight in the eyes, although it will remind me of what a terrible prison their souls might live in. A soul, if it even exists, asks for a goal, for meaning, for a unique purpose in life.The zombies...they don't have that purpose. They don't know what they want in life, all they do is.....exist. If their illness is a prison for their soul, then it is most definitely a solitary.I will go out there today and I will look them straight into their dead eyes, and reach my hand out through the void, hoping that somebody will reach back. And if they do, if I see that spark in their cold, dead eyes, I will try and turn it into a gushing red fire, a fire that will guide them through the grayness back into the world of living.
Each morning, before going out, I am looking myself in the mirror, checking for a deadly shade of blue in my eyes. It's all good, they are as green as they were yesterday. Another day begins. Am I ready for it? No. But nobody ever is. All we have at the beginning is hope, cause when you go into the unknown, hope is all that you can take with you. This is who I am, this is what makes me. My name is Adrian. Adrian Lancaster. And I will not stop until I see the sun again.
The view from my bedroom window has seen nothing but gray smoke for years back. Ever since the explosion. The constant tapping of rain on the glass has become a sound so natural, that without it I think I would go crazy. I think I would not be able to cope with the silence. I wish to see the horizon once again. Will I ever?
I turned on the TV. News. There you have it, more gray, an orgy of gray. A lot of colors, a lot of lies, but gray still. Pain and suffering wrapped in a nice colorful piece of paper, reeks with grayness because it's the same shit, but just a different day. Another zombie attack. They are happening more and more often. It might even be a good thing, maybe some color will come out of this gray blob our city has turned into, even if the color would be a bright arterial bloody red. The weather forecast has lost it's sense, they are not even talking about the weather, just about the number of days we spent without sun. It's the year 2114, up to date, 3257 days have passed since the explosion, and no man standing on earth has seen the sun since.
I do remember the sun. The sunset, that day before the explosion. It was magnificent, a symphony of colors, a definition of joy drawn by the force of nature. Everyone slept peacefully that night, as usual, as if the world will not end tomorrow. And tomorrow, everything changed.
It began as a devastating earthquake, soon turned out to be the eruption of the biggest underwater volcano on earth, which in line caused more earthquakes all over the world, and even more volcanic eruptions. Caused tsunamis that brought New York and half of the Nederlands under water, devastation all over Europe and Asia, but the worse was the power failure that caused chain reaction of the nuclear power plants in Japan. The island of Japan was no more, the fallout took millions of victims, the earthquakes and volcanic activities did not stop for weeks, gray dust and ashes covered the earth. And then, just as humanity thought that it was over... the disease came.
People turned into zombies. Don't get me wrong, this was not your typical horror movie-like zombie that eats brains.The people simply...started turning off, lose their interest in life. One day they were alive, talking about how screwed up it is to live in a world damaged like this, the next one, they would start losing their will about anything, bad cases would stop going to work, talking, communicating... living... the worst cases would even stop moving, and eventually, they would die from malnutrition. The easiest way to recognize a zombie is to look them in their eyes, cause no matter what color their eyes were before they got sick, the moment the disease would get them, their eyes were getting a shade of azure blue. I call it the color of death. Looking them into their dead blue eyes, was causing a chill to run down my spine. It was like looking into the deepest of the voids, which was trying to suck out the soul out of me.
And so the world adapted. Humanity tried to find the cure, without success till this day. Meanwhile, the zombie disease was spreading, more and more people lost their will to live, they would sit down in the park or in a cafe, staring into a distant point with their dead eyes, and then after a while they would get up and move on.The doctors were saying that, for the infected, the best way to fight the illness was to try and stay integrated into the society, if possible work any kind of a job, meet and interact with people, stay in as much contact with the world as possible, to slow down the progress of the illness. And sometimes it would help....but lately, more often, it would make them aggressive, violent, as if the illness would rather self-destruct the host then let them become alive again.Such cases would, in a furious outburst of rage, attack anything and everything in their vicinity, and many times it ended in fatalities. This is where I come in.
My parents never had much faith in me.I was a college dropout, in constant conflict with the authorities, and I never understood why is this so, until after the explosion: I simply did not know what am I good at. But now, I found my place. I am a part of a special unit called "The Pacifiers", and my job is to help reintegrate the infected into the society, but also, by any means necessary, protect the remaining healthy men, women and children out there, to pacify each and any zombie outburst.
In this gray new world, I am the one trying to keep the steering wheel straight, in the midst of all of this grayness and bitterness, day in and day out. And this is how my days begin - staring at the grayness and hoping for a ray of sunlight. Until that ray comes, I will do my duty, I will not stop, I will never abandon hope that maybe the sun will bring light into those dead eyes, convince them to come back among the living, to spark a quantum of hope in them as well. I will go out there today, sit in the coffee bars with them, talk to them, look them straight in the eyes, although it will remind me of what a terrible prison their souls might live in. A soul, if it even exists, asks for a goal, for meaning, for a unique purpose in life.The zombies...they don't have that purpose. They don't know what they want in life, all they do is.....exist. If their illness is a prison for their soul, then it is most definitely a solitary.I will go out there today and I will look them straight into their dead eyes, and reach my hand out through the void, hoping that somebody will reach back. And if they do, if I see that spark in their cold, dead eyes, I will try and turn it into a gushing red fire, a fire that will guide them through the grayness back into the world of living.
Each morning, before going out, I am looking myself in the mirror, checking for a deadly shade of blue in my eyes. It's all good, they are as green as they were yesterday. Another day begins. Am I ready for it? No. But nobody ever is. All we have at the beginning is hope, cause when you go into the unknown, hope is all that you can take with you. This is who I am, this is what makes me. My name is Adrian. Adrian Lancaster. And I will not stop until I see the sun again.
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