I watched the new Left 4 Dead trailer, and it is AWESOME.  As a result I felt like doing a zombie story, take a look.

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It never really occurred to him before just how much the zombie apocalypse would suit serial killers. It would be like their own little fun house. Thousands of people all lining up to be shot, stabbed, crushed or exploded. Made him wish he was a psycho.

He wasn’t a psycho, as much as he would like to be. What he was was lucky. He’d been paintballing when the zombies had become a proper menace. It was remarkably quick, even by zombie standards. He’d seen the films of course, read the books, and they all seemed to believe that it would take a few days for a full-scale infection to kick in.

It took six hours.

He’d been out with his friends at a notoriously shady paintball park. It was cheap and dangerous, badly designed with jagged bits of metal as makeshift cover, and it made him feel like a real man. He was too much of a coward to join the army or any other ‘manly’ profession, so instead he made do with paintball. It was out of the way, in a nearby forest, so he hadn’t heard about the outbreak. No-one there had.

Ten minutes into the journey home, the horde found them. Fifty people, wet blood glistening on their faces and saturating their clothes, were running down the road at full pelt. He’d stopped the car like a fool, just sat their in the middle of the road as the horde got closer. His friend was screaming for him to turn the car around but he couldn’t. Something in his mind was telling him this was all wrong, that many people shouldn’t be running down the road towards him, certainly not while covered in that much blood.

His friend was screaming at him, trying to take control of the car, when the horde caught up. They surrounded the car, screaming and salivating, and hammered on the windows. Car windows aren’t the easiest of windows to break, but the horde had an awful lot of muscle behind it. Their assault caused deep cracks to form with each strike, and still he sat there. Then the passenger window gave out. They reached in and took his friend, and still he sat there.

Fresh meat outside the car acted, quite predictably, as chum in the water. All fifty of them descended on his friend. He watched them rip him apart, heard him screaming, and he finally acted.

He slammed the car into reverse, did a speedy 3-point turn, and fled back to the paintball camp. Turned out that they were shady for a reason. Military nuts ran the place, the sort that manage to get their hands on illegal weapons because ‘a real man knows how to use a gun’. They’d finally turned on the radio once the day’s clients were done and dusted, and had heard about the outbreak. He arrived just as they had finished loading the last of their arsenal.

The horde weren’t far behind him, and he got to see firsthand just how deadly an illegal gun can be. Fifty people, gunned down in less than a minute. It was sickeningly clinical. Three round bursts, each burst chewing through at least one person, yet the men themselves were silent. The only time they spoke was to announce when they were reloading so that the others could cover them. It was terrifying.

He was used to the films. You shoot a zombie and you crack a joke, a sneaky one-liner to calm the nerves and show your superiority. These guys didn’t follow that mold. To them the shooting was almost mechanical. It was perfectly efficient, planned to the finest detail so that each man was firing at a different target. There was no waste, not a single shot missed a target, and not a single person got closer than a few hundred metres.

It was as if they had planned for this exact situation. But how could they? Nobody knew this was going to happen, and they certainly didn’t know he was going to turn up dragging a horde behind him. They just seemed to gel, to be able to read each other so well they could react as one.

They scared him, but they had saved his life. They even offered him a gun and a few firing lessons. They were quite pleasant for madmen. But then, maybe it would be the madmen that would save the world.

He wondered if, just maybe, you can learn to be a psycho.