One of Many

You don’t ‘close one eye and gaze calmly down your gun sight and let off seven rounds with precision’. You don’t have a gun and even if you did you wouldn’t have a clue how to use it. Sure, you could point it in the right(ish) direction and pull the trigger. We could even at a push assume you would think to find and turn off the safety but in terms of the rigorous cleaning necessary in maintaining any kind of firearm and the correspondent assembly and disassembly (let aside owning the prerequisite tools for such a task) you would be lost.

So, as we established, you don’t gaze calmly down your gun sight and let off seven rounds with precision. Had you done so ‘seven of the living dead’ might well have ‘fallen with smoking bullet holes clinically placed in their foreheads’ but you didn’t and concordantly neither do they.

No, instead what happens is you keep crawling backwards with the result being the somewhat less impressive scratching of your hands on the cold concrete as you move with a pace that as fate would have it is just a little faster than the approaching shamble of silhouettes, their dark disfigured forms cast against an evening sky enflamed red with the fires of a burning city.

In the long term this escape and evasion approach is going to do you little good, a fact not lost on the industrious folk down in the ‘Common Sense and Logic Dept.’ of your brain. But as it happens they are having some technical issues in reaching the ‘Decision Making and Motor Cortex’. They are just a metaphor for the reasons behind your inaction so we can’t, but if we were able to speak to them they might say: “It’s always the same with those jackasses, when it comes down to high-pressure situations they never make a call until they have t...”

Ah.

That would be the shape of the wall that your back suddenly finds itself pressed up against and the zero-point-two miles-per-hour faster than the dark-disfigured-forms-cast against-a-night-sky-enflamed-red-with-the-fires-of-a-burning-city becomes zero-point-nothing. In fact you’re now moving noticeably slower, the metaphorical folk in the metaphorical ‘Common Sense and Logic Dept’ hand in their notices and clear their desks citing irreconcilable differences with ‘Decision Making and Motor Cortex’ as their ‘Reason for Departure’ and you stop doing much of anything. It’s actually kind of impressive, your stillness that is, given the circumstances. You can’t even scream, not that it would make much difference, the air is filled with screams and it’s a bit late to jump on that particular bandwagon.

The group of not-quite-dead-enough-to-pose-no-threat-people (one of them is missing an arm but seems to be over it) fall on you in what at first resembles the most hideous and awful smelling group hug of all time but takes on a much more serious note (as these things invariably do) the moment your flesh is broken.

Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes. You don’t curse your own stupidity. You don’t think of a time when things were better. There’s not even a revelation about a past lover or a shape emerging from the flames to drag you to safety.

Had you been able to feel anything at all besides an unbelievable (you had to be there really) amount of pain you might have felt more than a little peeved at this and no doubt your own failure to run away like just about every fucker else seems to be doing but at least you’re screaming now.

That’s something I suppose.